Help Set Alliance Policy Priorities for 2009

Advocates Alert: September 9, 2008

Each year, the Land Trust Alliance's Policy Advisory
Council* has an open meeting at Rally to discuss which public policy issues we
should prioritize for next year. That
meeting is session D-24, on Sunday afternoon in room 404. If you are at Rally, I hope you will join us,
and give us your input.

If you can't attend the Sunday session, we hope you will read
the policy
options memo below and send us your feedback by Monday, September 29. The purpose of the Alliance is to help you
conserve land -- and you are the best judge of what public policy work will help
most.

There are lots of issues we could be working on. Each year, we ask the Council -- and you --
to prioritize our options, using the following criteria:

Would the objective of the policy priority result in
broad, national benefits?

Is there a reasonable prospect that the objective
will be successful?

Is the Alliance's participation critical to
success?

Does the Alliance have the capacity to achieve that
success?

Will the initiative have general support from the
Alliance's membership?

Is the objective consistent with land
trusts' support for voluntary
conservation by willing landowners?

The Policy Advisory Council has been discussing our
policy options for 2009 for some time.
Now, we want to hear from you.
For us to succeed in our policy work, your land trust needs to persuade
your political representatives that land conservation is important. Are we going after the right things? Or should we change
course?

2009 Policy Priority Options

Each year, our Policy Advisory Council makes
recommendations for how the Land Trust Alliance should prioritize its public
policy efforts for the following year. For 2008, the Council recommended
that the Alliance's
policy work center around three basic priorities:

Making the 2006 increase in conservation tax incentives permanent,
and

Increasing federal support for farmland conservation.

This recommendation was adopted by the Alliance's Board of
Directors. The Alliance has had essentially identical
priorities since 2006. We want your input on what our priorities
should be next year -- because our bottom line is how we can best help
you meet your conservation goals.

We look forward to hearing from you at Rally workshop D24, 10:30AM to Noon on Sunday, Sept. 21. If you're unable to join us, please use this chart to rank the options below and email your comments to policy@lta.org by September 16th.

Our criteria for policy priorities

Several years ago, the Alliance’s Policy
Advisory Council adopted the following criteria for consideration of our public
policy priorities:

Would the objective of the policy priority
result in broad, national benefits?

Is there a reasonable prospect that the
objective will be successful?

Is the Alliance's
participation critical to success?

Does the Alliance
have the capacity to achieve that success?

Will the initiative have general support from
the Alliance's
membership?

Is the objective consistent with land trusts'
support for voluntary conservation by willing landowners?

2008 Priorities

Over the past several years, the IRS has
completely changed its approach to enforcement of the law governing charitable
donations – with particular attention to donations of conservation
easements. The IRS initiated audits of more
than 900 conservation easement donations in the past several years. Most
of these cases have yet to be resolved. How
these cases are resolved will change the rules we live by. In addition, the IRS has increased its
oversight of charities, resulting in changes to the Forms 8283 and Form 990,
and a new and much more aggressive enforcement stance. There are real risks that new policies and
practices at the IRS could have significant impacts on land trusts, and on our
ability to conserve land.

The IRS is a large and complex bureaucracy,
and both their policy-setting and audit processes are slow. We can expect
this issue to be of great importance to land trusts for the next several years
– or longer.

2. Making the 2006 increase in conservation tax
incentives permanent

In 2006 Congress enacted a major increase in
tax benefits for conservation easement donors, expiring at the end of
2007. In 2007 and 2008, we were able to make
great progress toward winning a permanent extension of this policy, including
recruiting 200 Congressional sponsors for our legislation. In 2008, we won an extension of this
provision, but only through 2009. That means that making the incentive
permanent is an issue that is still very much with us.

Is the new incentive making a difference?
Many land trusts reported a remarkable surge in interest in conservation
easements amongst local landowners. It
will, however, probably take years of outreach, particularly to agricultural
landowners, before the full potential of this incentive is realized.

3. Increasing federal support for farmland conservation

The Alliance
began work in 2006 on a new farm bill, which finally became law in 2008.
The new law (covering FY 2008 – FY 2012) provides $743 million for the Farmland
Protection Program, and authority to protect 1.22 million additional acres
under the Grassland Reserve Program, estimated to cost $300 million. That’s an average of $208 million a year for
these programs – a big increase from the $125 million a year in the prior Farm
Bill.

These are funds that can share in the cost of
purchasing conservation easements by land trusts. The new bill also includes
significant policy changes that should make both programs much friendlier for
land trusts and landowners. Many thanks
are due to American Farmland Trust, the Partnership of Rangeland Trusts, National
Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and The Nature Conservancy for their work on this
issue.

We are still working with the Department of
Agriculture on rulemakings for these programs, but we do not anticipate spending anywhere near the time and effort we put
forward in 2007 on this issue. That
work stretched our capacity to near the breaking point. If we
can increase our capacity, however, we do have the opportunity to start
something new in 2009.

Additional Issues for 2009?

There are real limits to the number of
issues the Alliance
can significantly influence. We can and do add our name to other
efforts
that help land trusts - but our ability to provide leadership and
detailed
attention is limited by our resources – and by yours. We can only be
effective when our member land
trusts are actively engaged in the policy issues we are working on.
Recently, the Alliance has been able to take leadership on no
more than two or three national policy issues.

Below is a very brief review of a number of
issues of concern to the land trust community. Each of the items listed
here - and many others - could significantly help land conservation.

4. Make aid for land conservation an element of Global Climate
Change legislation

Earlier this year, the Senate
Committee on Environment and Public Works voted in favor of a bill to create a
“cap and trade” system for controlling US carbon dioxide emissions in order to
mitigate climate change. Both major
party candidates for President have endorsed a similar approach. Though the
bill failed to break a filibuster on the Senate floor, there seems to be
growing momentum for further policy dialogue on control of carbon dioxide
emissions (largely from burning of fossil fuels).

In an era of shrinking
federal funding and strong political opposition to higher federal taxes, the Senate
bill represents a potentially huge source of new federal funding available to
the Congress (from the “auction” of carbon permits to industry).

The 2008 bill would have provided more than $9
billion a year of those funds for wildlife conservation, including major allocations to the Land and Water
Conservation Fund and for the implementation of state wildlife plans. The Senate bill does not allocate any of this
funding specifically for private land protection.

In addition, some of the
very valuable carbon permits created in the bill were allocated to
“sequestration projects” that take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The
projects envisioned in the bill include protection of tropical forests – but do
not explicitly include land protection projects in the US. Protecting natural and agricultural lands in
the US
may be important to achieving the goal of reduced carbon emissions, as they
currently absorb roughly 12.5% of US carbon emissions each year. So far, however, the legislative process has
given this little consideration.

The lack of consideration
given the conservation work of land trusts in this policy arena is both a huge
opportunity, and a huge challenge. The economics
at work in this policy area are immense.
We have a discrete and so far, largely unrepresented voice to add. But there are many other interests already
engaged here.

If we hope to influence federal policy on global
climate change, we will need to tightly focus on discrete pieces of this policy
puzzle that directly affect our work. Otherwise, our voice will be lost in the din.

It is also clear that we
cannot hope to have an effective voice in this arena without significant
outreach to the land trust community about how climate change may affect the
lands they care for, and how certain policy options may help them respond to
those changes.

5. Enact additional new federal conservation tax incentives

If we succeed in making the new easement
donation incentive permanent, we will face an interesting question - what
should our next goal be? Any of these tax changes could be important to
the future of land conservation:

Further estate
tax benefits for properties under conservation easements;

A cut in capital
gains tax on sales of land or easements to a conservation entity; or

We mention estate tax first because it is
very likely that the Congress will take up estate tax reform in 2009. In the course of that reform, it is very
likely that the unified credit against estate tax will be raised to $3-5
million per person, meaning that, for the most part, estates of less than $6
million will not be affected by the estate tax at all.

That means that relatively few people will
be affected by the estate tax – although clearly, those few may own important
properties. Several members of Congress
are working on reforms that provide special treatment for lands protected by
conservation easements. The Piedmont
Environmental Council is advocating for HR 3708, an expansion of the existing
estate tax incentive for conservation easements, IRC 2031(c)). There will also be proposals to exempt all
agricultural lands from estate tax.

Conservation incentives not related to the
estate tax may have a much harder time getting started next year, as the
economic slowdown and increasing medical and retirement expenditures are making
the federal budget situation worse – making new tax cuts (and new spending) even
harder to achieve.

6. Defend federal funding for
the purchase of land and easements

As budget deficits restrain federal spending
on non-defense programs, Congressionally-determined funding for programs to
purchase land and conservation easements have been under great
pressure. Those programs include the Land and Water Conservation Fund
(including its grants to state parks agencies), the Forest Legacy Program, the
North American Wetlands Conservation Act grants program, State Wildlife Grants,
and others. Some have done better than others, and while they have
rebounded somewhat in the past two years (to about $400 million a year), their
long-term prospects are problematic because of growing federal budget deficits.

A number of major conservation organizations
(including Alliance members The Nature
Conservancy, the Trust for Public
Land, and The
Conservation Fund) have been working hard to maintain this funding, or
re-invent it through new authorizing legislation that taps federal oil and gas
revenues.

In addition, at least one Member of Congress
is interested in starting a federal grant program for land trusts.

7. Help land trusts enact state
tax incentives for land conservation

There is little question that the enactment
of transferable state income tax credits for conservation donors greatly
accelerated conservation donations in Colorado and Virginia. Several other
states are considering similar tax credits.

Although our policy program has been
designed to work on federal policy issues affecting land trusts across the
country, the effectiveness of these state tax measures has led many in the
conservation community to view them as the most effective possible conservation
incentive. Important questions may be how the Alliance
could effectively help states enact such credits and whether working in one or
a few select states would be a wise use of Alliance resources.

8.
Fight energy-development threats to conserved lands

A 2005 Energy Bill allows the U.S.
Department of Energy (DOE) to declare “National Interest Electric Transmission
Corridors” across broad regions of the country. This designation provides
utilities federal condemnation authority to construct transmission lines,
exempts these proposals from environmental review, and preempts traditional
state regulation of transmission lines and local land use laws. Conserved
lands may be at particular risk due to their lower condemnation costs.

Land trusts in Pennsylvania
and Virginia
have taken a leading role in this issue, both fighting specific proposals in their
region, and seeking Congressional oversight of this sweeping DOE authority.
With the designation of additional corridors nationwide, these land trusts are
seeking a national organization to take the lead in coordinating a federal
policy response.

Thus far, the Alliance has primarily addressed this issue
as a legal one, through our Conservation Defense program. To take on a more
significant coordinating role on federal policy would require a significant
investment of Alliance
resources in an unfamiliar regulatory field.

This is not the only energy-related threat
to conserved lands. Many lands that were
protected by land trusts when energy development was not thought to be likely
are now, with higher energy prices and new technologies for energy extraction,
very much at threat. These include lands underlain by shale beds that may now
be explored for natural gas in places as diverse as Montana,
New York and Pennsylvania,
and the Appalachians.

9. Increase advocacy skills and
activism by land trusts, generally

This effort has always played a supporting
role in our work on specific federal policy issues. Should it play a more
prominent role in the Alliance's
policy program? In the past, federal
policy issues – like the new tax incentive for easement donations – have we
have used to enable us to capture land trusts’ attention to developing their
advocacy skills. Is there a better way? We want to hear your ideas for how we can
best help land trust leaders become skillful advocates for conservation in
their communities.

Tell
us your ideas for what the Alliance's
policy program should be doing. You may have a very different take on how the
Alliance's
policy program can best help land trusts achieve their goals. If so, let
us know!

Document Actions

February 12: The House successfully voted 279-137, demonstrating a supermajority (67%) of support, on H.R. 644, a package of charitable incentives including the conservation tax incentive.Now we need your help in the Senate to secure co-sponsors! Sens. Heller and Stabenow have requested land trusts’ assistance in asking senators to cosponsor S. 330, the Conservation Easement Incentive Act.Learn more »